Yes I have.

Totally.

Just…

Just excuse me for a few hours. I’ll be, er..

I’ll… I’ll be at Blunty! Yeah. that sounds good.

At Blunty.

“Nano drones that an infantryman can pull out of his pocket; helicopters piloted by robots who extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield; micro satellites on demand; large spy balloons in the upper reaches of the stratosphere; virtual training with a helmet from your office; algorithms that resolve pilots’ ethical dilemmas (so they won’t have to deal with those pesky war crimes tribunals); and farming out code to a network of high school kids.”

I can remember when I was plotting out the first part of Weapons of Choice how much time I spent poring over stories like this. It was partly what motivated me to write the book in the first place, the idea of mashing up old and new tech together.
I doubt that will be seeing many nano drones, even in The Zone. Ten years is just a bit too short an horizon to pull off a technological acceleration like that. But given how much military and civilian technology and information came through Manning Pope’s wormhole, and given that the world has had 10 years of relative peace and prosperity to exploit them, I’m fairly confident there would be some quite massive leaps forward over the original timeline. Even if it’s only a leap into, say, the 1970s.

Soon as I found out there was an iPad edition, I was there with my credit card ready to roll. This was going to be awesome. I could only begin to imagine the awesome levels of awesome that the world’s most awesome gaming magazine could bring to my master’s magical slab.
Meh. Not so much, as it turns out. The content is still as good as ever. The writing some of the best prose and analysis you’ll read anywhere, not just in the gaming press. The graphics look stunning on the retina display. And the entire package shits me to tears because it’s virtually unreadable.
Why?
Because all of the things that make Edge such a beautiful piece of media in hard copy, vast expanses of real estate given over to beautiful, intricately laid out illustrations and text, simply don’t work when they are transferred holus bolus to the screen. As stunning as the new display is, it’s simply too small, yes too small, to work like that. I find myself constantly having to move and resize blocks of text as they wrap themselves around illustrations. In hard copy, this doesn’t matter. Our eyes do all of that work. But when you have to reach out and move everything around with your hand, sometimes as much as half a dozen times a page, the reading experience becomes… well, sub optimal let’s say.
I can understand how the magazine got themselves into this position. They really do look amazing in hard copy. And because so much of the visual appeal comes down to the graphics they’re lifting from the games it would seem natural that the appeal would transfer wholly intact to the iPad, or to any high-resolution display for that matter.
Not so.
Just as newspapers have discovered that the grid format doesn’t transfer well when it becomes busy and overcrowded and hopelessly dense, magazine publishers are catching up to the same inconvenient truth. A really good example are the two fitness magazines I subscribe to on the pad. The Australian versions of Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness. In print Men’s Health is the superior product. And I say this as someone who loves both magazines and has worked in the industry for over 20 years. MH runs longer articles, in much greater depth, with less studied buffoonery than its rival. It’s simply the more grown-up product.
And yet Men’s Fitness has totally owned them in digital form. Whereas MH makes all the same mistakes as Edge in its iPad edition, Men’s Fitness has built their app from the ground up, not just to take advantage of the new technology, but to constrain themselves from running wild with it. It’s this constraint, keeping things as simple as possible on the screen, that makes Men’s Fitness a pleasure to read and to use on the iPad were Men’s Health is most often annoying.
Of course it’s not all about simplicity. Sometimes the very opposite is required. When The New Yorker first arrived on the iPad I subscribed straight away. I love this magazine but had always resisted subscribing because of the costs and inconvenience involved in having a copy mailed every week from the US. Thanks to the iPad that problem was solved. And The New Yorker had a head start because the layout of the magazine in hard copy lent itself to a direct transfer to the screen. This allowed them to get away with simply loading something like a PDF version of the mag into their app because the large single columns of text were not nearly as frustrating as other magazines more complicated layouts to navigate with your fingers.
The retina display and changing expectations soon put paid to that, however. With all of those extra pixels to play with, the magazine looked like total shit. Also, thanks to some quite complex functionality built into reading apps such as the Kindle and iBooks people were becoming used to ‘living’ text that could be highlighted, copied, exported, searched within a device’s dictionary and so on. The first version of The New Yorker allowed for none of that. They have recently updated, though, and the mag is now one of the best things you can read on the pad. Interestingly, since offering iPad only subscriptions, Condé Nast, the publisher, has seen the number of subscribers to The New Yorker  increase by tens of thousands. This gives some hope to those of us who make a living out of doing this stuff.
Cue the voice of doom from Orin.

How did this get made? A podcast about shitty, shitty movies. More than once I have laughed so much I wet my pants a little.

Highlights so far. The Smurfs. Catwoman. twilight: Breaking Dawn. Aaaaand Birdemic. (This highlights reel really gets going about 4 mins in).